Editor : Jeannie Lieberman |
Submit an Article |
Contact Us | 
For Email Marketing you can trust
A View From The Bridge Mark Strong as Carbone with Phoebe Fox (left) and Nicola Walker. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
By Eugene Paul
On stage, left and right are banked high and deep with theater seats. Everyone is taken. Center stage, a black monolith sits on a low, transparent wall. We can see bare feet in the lighted arena within. The palpable air of anticipation in the packed house grows tenser as the house lights dim. Slowly, very slowly, the black box lifts until it is up out of sight, overhead in the flies.
Two men, Eddie (Mark Strong) and Louis (Richard Hansell) are ritually showering in the brightly lit arena, water cascading down on them. We grasp immediately: it’s after work. Silently, they dry themselves. “Why aren’t they completely nude?” one thought flickers, and goes. Of course. This isn’t about nudity, it’s about the symbolism of a deluge. We are in for a deluge of emotion, and we’re already palpitating with anxiety.
How can we be in such a state? This is the fourth revival of Miller’s play in less than ten years. We know it inside out. But we don’t – this time, everything is different.
Alfieri (Michael Gould) comes on, tells us he’s a lawyer and that Eddie Carbone came to him for help with his problem. But Eddie’s problem was Eddie. He was a tragedy in the making. And Alfieri, our Greek chorus (originally, Miller wrote the play in verse), tells us, shows us, participates helplessly as Eddie’s destiny unfolds.
Our arena has now become the back yard of Eddie’s house, where he and his wife Beatrice (Nicola Walker) live. But we remain, in set designer Jan Versweyveld’s existential, stripped bare arena, with the low, enclosing, transparent wall. Eddie and Beatrice, from large Italian families, live in a close-kie neighborhood full of working class Italians They have no children – we never find out why, or what their barren state does to them.
Beatrice’s niece, Catherine (Phoebe Fox), lives with them. Why, we don’t know. What we do know is that Eddie is crazy about his little girl. And Catherine loves her Uncle Eddie. She leaps into his arms and throws her legs around him every time he comes home from work. It’s lovely.
Not entirely. Catherine is Eddie’s baby girl; sweet, loving, and completely obedient. But Catherine is seventeen years old, and Beatrice is past worried.
Director Van Hove has distilled the ingredients of Arthur Miller’s play to an emotional simplicity which is so complex, we are never at ease. He has demanded from his set designer the barest of essentials, to throw our entire focus on his characters, and taken us with him. These aren’t the Brooklynese Italians we know so well; these are the primal essence of their passions.
Beatrice’s cousins, Marco (Michael Zegen) and his brother Rodolpho (Russell Tovey) arrive, needing a place to stay, a safe place. They’re in the US illegally, searching for work. Post-war Italy is literally starving. Eddie not only offers his home, but his protection. He’ll even find them work. Marco has a wife and two babies; Rodolpho is a sexy young buck. And Catherine is smitten. Suddenly, in a household of barefoot family members, she puts on high heels – and is no longer Eddie’s baby girl. The catastrophe begins to unfold.
Eddie is being torn apart. He knows what he feels for Catherine is wrong, yet how could it be? He loves her; he cherishes her; he protects her. How can she even look at that blond headed punk, a lousy kid who doesn’t even know anything. Day after day, week after week, under his protection, hitton on an innocent baby girl.
Eddie’s got to do something. He’s got to. Alfieri, the lawyer, sees what’s going on, helpless. Beatrice, her courage exhausted, her mouth full of fear, can say nothing. Eddie is convinced this punk Rodolpho is “not right.” He makes the men laugh. He sings to them. He wants to use Catherina and Eddie knows what for. But Catherine listens, not to Eddie, but only to Rodolpho. Eddie cannot bear it, when it’s Catherine who shouts at him. She loves Rodolpho, and he loves her; she wants to marry him. She’ll get a job, soon, he’ll get a job, it’s her LIFE!
And Eddie does his ultimate: anonymously, he betrays Rodolpho and Marco to Immigration. For Marco, it’s as if Eddie has killed Marco’s babies, killed his wife. He’ll have revenge. The betrayal is world-shattering. Eddie has destroyed his own honor, and their shared faith and trust.
And in a blinding deluge of red rain, director Ivo Van Hove wreaks symbolic havoc on us, as he drives his hell bent company to their doom. The tragedy of Eddie Carbone completes.
A View From The Bridge At the Lyceum Theater, through February 21, 2016 149 W. 45th St. 
|
